Mr. Amri was stopped by the police outside a train station around 3 a.m. local time. He quickly pulled out a pistol and shot one officer. He was shot and killed by another officer.

Hours later, the Islamic State released a video featuring Mr. Amri in which he declares he was avenging coalition airstrikes that have killed civilians in Syria.

Investigators were trying to determine if Mr. Amri had been working with anyone else, and how he managed to flee Germany.

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CreditPavel Golovkin/Associated Press

2. “Let it be an arms race.” That’s what President-elect Donald Trump said in a phone call with an MSNBC host who asked about his recent comments on Twitter on nuclear weapons.

“We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Mr. Trump said. We attempted to translate and explain his tweet on this subject.

Mr. Trump also released a letter from Vladimir Putin in which the Russian president said he hoped to “bring our level of collaboration on the international scene to a qualitatively new level.” Mr. Trump called it “a very nice letter.”

In his annual marathon news conference in Moscow, Mr. Putin said Russia was not seeking a new arms race, but is looking to improve its armaments so that they could pierce other nations’ missile defenses.

8. Pope Francis is elevating a new crop of leaders to realign the Roman Catholic Church with his priorities.

Among them is Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, the 64-year-old incoming archbishop of Newark, N.J. He’s an amiable guy from a working-class neighborhood in Detroit who has ministered to the poor, AIDS patients and death-row inmates.